Darren Dworkin, CIO, Cedars-Sinai, Chapter 3

“Innovation in hospitals isn’t new.” It may seem like an obvious statement, but as most health IT leaders can attest, it’s not. In fact, it’s a common misconception. The reality, says Darren Dworkin, CIO at Cedars-Sinai, is that innovation has always been a core philosophy at academic medical centers. What’s novel is the focus around delivery of care, and the pivotal role digital technology can play facilitating communication and enabling patients to become more engaged.

At Cedars-Sinai, innovation has always been part of the culture, whether it’s by being an early adopter of Epic’s Care Everywhere, working with Apple as a foundation member, or creating a “living lab” for startups through its Accelerator program. For Dworkin, this philosophy is the only way to move forward in the ever-changing health IT landscape. Recently, we spoke with him about the evolution in consumer engagement (and what it means for CIOs), how the recent Cambridge Analytica saga “opened peoples’ eyes,” the most significant way in which the CIO role has changed since he started 12 years ago, and what gets him most excited about the future.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Cedars-Sinai’s Accelerator Program – “We’re seeing a lot of benefits”

* Creating jobs in the LA area

* Collaboration around innovation – “Rising water rises all boats”

* 13 years with Cedars-Sinai

* Implementing CPOE – “The bar was set low.”

* Changing expectations with health IT initiatives

* The future: patient and consumer engagement

* “It’s a very exciting time.”



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Bold Statements

Being able to support the community and have some small part in growing the health IT ecosystem here in Los Angeles is rewarding, above and beyond some of the more immediate benefits we’re seeing from the companies we interact with.

The bigger we can grow the network and the ecosystem, the more we’re helping the industry as a whole. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter to us where a great company gets created, as long as great companies are being created to solve real problems in healthcare.

For a long time, I think healthcare organizations were so focused on the complexities and difficulties of implementing what the rest of the industry would refer to as enterprise software that we really got stuck for a while thinking that was the entire problem.

Healthcare is different. The stakes are different. Not every patient is a consumer, and not every consumer is a patient. There a lot of intricate and nuanced details that we need to manage; but with all of that, there’s still a big role that digital or a digital overlay will end up playing.

Gamble:  It sounds like the work you’re doing with innovation has really been educational for the organization.

Dworkin:  The good news about it is that we’re seeing lots of tertiary and quaternary benefits, which is something we really aim to do, because resources are so scarce and we have to make sure we’re managing the right opportunity costs. The staff who come to the Accelerator seem to leave with a little bit of a bounce in their step.

Let’s face it, we all have a tendency to imagine that the grass is greener on the other side. If you work for an organization and you get a paycheck and you have a day job, you imagine that working in a startup must be perfect, and vice-versa. This is giving folks who have wonderment and curiosity of how startups and entrepreneurs operate a chance to see a little...